


(Pavlov's) Dog is a man's best friend

by Kafkaesque (Steviacookies)



Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe - High School, Bad Psychiatry, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Manipulation, Emotional Whatever, Eventual Smut (Maybe), Hannibal is still a cannibal, M/M, Mostly because it rhymes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-08-17
Updated: 2013-08-27
Packaged: 2017-12-23 19:36:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/930279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Steviacookies/pseuds/Kafkaesque
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"That's what you are afraid of- Are you a martyr or a murderer, Will?"</p><p>Doctor Lecter is the school counsellor and Will is unaware of how easily silence becomes therapy, and therapy something else.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Devil's Trill

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Or “How to train your empathic teenage Will with Pavlovian conditioning”.  
> The sub-title says it all, really.

 

 

 

It is in the arid yard behind the school, between knotted nests of weeds and sad heaps of broken bricks, that Professor Alana Bloom finds him.

“Will,” she begins, her eyes aimed at the general direction of the green debris the headmaster stubbornly refuses to have cleaned up. Now that she has got closer, she can vaguely make out the outline of an unruly mop of dark-brown hair.

“Will,” she repeats, the name sounds harsher this time, “I know you're here. You can't skip classes like this.”

The wind is a frosty hiss in her ears, and she shivers as it breathes on her light nylon stockings.

“I– I know it's not easy for you, but it's your duty as a student.”

Professor Bloom stomps toward the bushes, “For God's sake, Will, stand up–  you're not a child.”

“Then why are you talking to me as if I were one?” the bushes finally answer, and weeds rustle and brick-dust crackles and suddenly there is a boy rising, his school uniform crooked and dishevelled, livid shadows under his eyes. His lips are stretched in an uneasy, tired smile.

Professor Bloom's gaze grows a bit warmer, and more worried.

“Aren't you cold?”

It's late autumn and the air is getting icier. It feels like a sharp paper-thin blade piercing one's lungs.

“No, I tends to be always uncomfortably hot,” Will Graham comments self-mockingly, as he steps out of the weeds and stops in front of her. And, as a matter of fact, he doesn't look like he's lying. His words are whiffs of vapour, a feverish mist clinging to his wind-reddened cheeks.

“I should give you a lengthy, healthy lecture,” she bursts out, her concern fueling her tone, “you're extremely lucky I'm not a professional scolder.”

The fond look Will tries to mask makes the corners of her mouth twitch for an instant, but she can't yield to the fifteen-years old boy, for his own sake.

“Don't think there won't be consequences, though.”

Will moved in town three months before, and she has never seen him completely at ease. It feels to her like his mind is perpetually running, dodging eyes and eluding hands, away from words and help, from every human being that casually crosses his faltering path. His grades are excellent, maybe he's her best student, but his head is always low when he speaks, his shoulder always tense when she kindly brushes her fingers on it. He's constantly afraid, but of what she does not know.

She fears it might be the result of an abusive environment at home. A conjecture strengthened by what's been happening lately: in the last few weeks, Will has asked her – the only teacher he talks to, the only one who's tying to understand him – if he could stay at school even after classes were over. She consented, and tried to take advantage of the situation by talking to him alone, but with no success. His mind was impregnable and the boy changed subjects with effortless skill. And now this–  Will got out class, during a between lessons break, and never came back. And here he was: hidden and buried in trash and thorns, alone. Like this was the only kind of peace he could hope to reach.

“I ought to bring you to the headmaster,” she reasons aloud. Yet, Headmaster Crawford doesn't strike her as a particularly tactful man. It isn't surely the ideal way to deal with Will's situation. And then it occurs to her, the other way, an achievable solution.

“But-?”

“But I won't,” Professor Bloom straightens her shoulder and deeply inhales a lungful of cold. She has decided. “Follow me.”

 

–

 

“Wait here, please. I won't be long.”

Professor Bloom vanishes behind a door of whitish plastic, that closes with a faint clink and leaves Will on his own, in the silence of the empty corridor.

Hanging from the door, a brass-like plaque with copperplate engravings catches Will's eyes, two words so mutilated – twirls and tangles of intertwined lines – by an elegant yet abstruse calligraphy that the result is utterly unreadable. Its presence troubles the boy, and yet he can't really say why.

 _It's wrong,_ he thinks. And even though it sounds childish and feeble an explanation even to himself, it _is_.

It is a visual cacophony, a dissonant sight– the ordinary cheap door and the polished metal of the plate; the sophisticated swirls of the letters and the stains on the scabrous plastic. It feels foreign, alien to the world he knows.

He has spent a couple of minutes staring at it, warily allured, before he finally starts wondering who the hell he would find on the other side of the door. Not the headmaster, for sure. Well, whoever it'll be, he is ready to raise his forts of hostility and close the walls on himself.

 _It's none of their business,_ he broods bitterly. Everyone's problems are also Will's, but Will's problems are only his own: that's what he has learnt. The tears in a stranger's gaze water his eyes as well, the anguish that makes a passerby frown furrows his brow too. _And the throb, the thirst, and the lust, the loss._

Will's mind is just a cracked mirror on the brink of shattering- and this he can stand, to bear his cross and smile while the nails pierce his palms; but he will never, ever, let anyone see how deeply the cracks run. Not the psychologists his father sent him to, not the schoolmates that whisper “crazy, he's crazy” behind his back, not even Professor Bloom. Kind, lovely, caring Professor Bloom. If she knew how blemished his brain is – just a bundle of synapses and scars, there's no way to repair it –, she would despise him, and sneer like everyone else.

He shakes his head – frantic wings of fear rustle in the cage of his skull – and tries to focus back on the plate.

 _It might be a name. The first one looks like a 'H'._ He's still trying to decipher the engravings when the door finally opens.

“I don't know how to thank you.”

With a small smile Professor Bloom steps out. He can sense her inquietude, like cold sweat on his nape, and his stomach lurches.

“Wine would be most appreciated,” a distinctly male voice answers from inside the room, “see you later, Alana.”

“Will,” she addresses to him now, half-shutting the door, “I'll see you tomorrow.” She wavers – he shudders – and bites her lower lip, as to convince herself, “I'm leaving you in good hands.” Then she turns away and her heels ticks down the corridor floor, and he's alone, with a meaningless vortex of letters and a door waiting ajar, a door to be opened. His legs are two sand towers.

And, suddenly, ripping the choice from his hands, the door opens by its own.

“Please, come in.”

In front of him stands a stately frame of lean legs, silk-tie covered chest, broad shoulders, square jawline and– he won't look at him in the face, he won't look at his eyes.

Will lowers his head as he trudges – the air is as dense as mud – in the room. The door closes behind his back with a sorry sound.

The office is, expanding before Will's furtive gaze, a furnished visual variation of the uneasiness the plate on the door left in him. The wallpaper is the same mould mottled white as all the other schoolrooms', and the floor tiles as red as ever, but these are the only things that give away the fact he is still in the same building. In the centre of the room rests an ebony writing desk, covered with rare-looking bulky books, and behind that is placed a lustrous leather armchair. Beside an aquamarine sofa, a bronze statue looms from the top of a bookshelf, portraying a– deer? An elk, a stag? The antlers are pointy volutes of metal.

“Professor Bloom rarely brings students to my humble door,” the man says, amused, and the teen is abruptly torn from his surveying. Will didn't notice it before, but there's a deep accent dripping from the stranger's – foreign, he's _foreign_ , like the plate and the statue – voice, that links and liquifies his words with a kind of flat musicality.

“Aren't you going to tell me who you are?” Will's voice, on the other hand, sounds rough – fear makes him fierce – and offensively loud among the unknown walls.

The man doesn't seem to care though, his voice is still mild and  warm and vaguely fake.

“Of course, how rude of me. My apologies. My name is Hannibal Lecter and I am the school counsellor.”   

“Oh, I see,” Will snorts, bubbles of rage burbling in the pit of his breast. “You're a psychologist.”

“As a matter of  fact,” Lecter slides gracefully in his armchair, undoing his jacket button and smoothing his tie, “I am not.”  Will can see his chin waver slightly; he's smiling. “Not that I think it would be any better to you, but I am a psychiatrist.”

“No, it wouldn't."

 _Great_. Just a doctor trying to toy with his head. He should get up and leave. And yet, Will thinks about Professor Bloom, how desperately she's trying to help him; he thinks of rising his gaze so as to look Doctor Lecter in the eyes. He doesn't.

He grabs a chair previously resting against the wall and drags it in front of the writing desk.

“And I'm supposed to stay here till the school-bell rings, aren't I,” Will declares deadpan as he sits down, no question marks in his inflection.

“Yes, I am afraid you are. But we could try and make this hour productive: we could socialize, like civilized people,” Doctor Lecter slightly shuffles closer, Will slightly jerks backward. “God forbids we become friendly.”

“Well, I don't find you that interesting,” he can't help grumbling, naively sure the doctor won't hear. Instants of silence seem to agree with him, but then an answer comes and the psychiatrist's voice, under all its warmth and accent, is adorned – _this is his true voice;_ a thought that flies and falls –  with a thin thread of threat.

“You will.”

Tension swells and then at once, before Will's brain could register the danger, deflates as the doctor squares his shoulders against the chair backrest.

“So, is there something you would like to talk about?”

There is a great pendulum clock in a corner of the room, with an intricate arabesque carved on the clock dial; the larger hand is ticking the minutes away, and Will focuses on it, hoping he'll be able to surrender himself to time, to echoes of seconds and sand in ancient hourglasses. He'll be out in forty minutes, he just has to ignore what this faceless – he still won't look – man says. The man that, presently, is softly chuckling; a chuckle going untranslated, a Slavic intake of air too harsh to be expressing real joy.

“Very good, Will. Although you ought to know that, to a psychiatrist's ears, no answer is still as good an answer as any.”

 _I won't talk, I won't talk-_ The forts have risen, the drawbridge is up. Will looks at his own nails. They're dirty.

“This is your hour: we can discuss everything you want, or we can discuss nothing at all- it's your choice. If quietness is what you need, silence shall be our therapy.”

Doctor Lecter shifts in his armchair and pulls something out of a drawer. The boy waits for him to insist, to poke and pester him with questions and silly tests till he gives in- but nothing comes. Just a soft scratching noise, of paper and pencils. Still, he waits. It may be a trap, a psychiatrish way of taunting him into talking. _I won't talk._ All his willpower is coiled in his clenched fists. And yet, there is no assault to be foiled.

Will decides to take a chance and look upward.

Doctor Lecter is _drawing_.

Holding a pencil, long fingers hover over the paper and then, as struck by some sudden burst of inspiration, plunge forward, dripping ripples of grey lines, just to surface again and _breathe_. It is a delicate loop of defining and delaying, designed to savour the motion at its utmost. Shapes spring up like wounds in the white and spread, from Will's side of the writing desk, in beautiful, meaningless figures. If he closes his eyes and tries to think of how it would be to stand on the other side of the sketch, to watch with Doctor Lecter's eyes his own creation, his own hands, then he will understand- he can see it now: it's a room, a bedroom. On the blank ceiling, Doctor Lecter is drawing clouds.

Maybe it's in that exact moment, during that glimpse of crosshatched clouds – gravity falters – , that Will starts seeing the psychiatrist in a different light. Even though the boy will never be aware of it, something switched. Before, these were hands waiting to hold cognitive tests, to seize his brain and weight it on a scale. Now, Doctor Lecter's hands are hands that can draw clouds on a ceiling.

The fort walls stand firm, yet Will is watching from a hidden loophole.

Suddenly, the boy opens his mouth – scales of rust scratch his throat – and, pointing with his chin at the drawing, murmurs,

“What are you...?”

“This?” Doctor Lecter doesn't sound even slightly surprised, even though the room has been silent for more than half an hour. “Something I saw, long ago,” he finally says, as if he were quoting a verse, “a room smelling like two hundred different perfumes.”

He gets up, and then slides in silent strides out of Will's view. The boy can hear a rummaging noise, clinks and pushed buttons, and at last, after instants of stillness, _music_. The melodious moan of a violin fills the room, in a succession of slow scales and baroque arpeggios. Amidst the music, Doctor Lecter's voice rings out like the second instrument during a duet, deep and exotic. “Tartini,” he explains, while the violin trills, “great Italian composer of the seventeenth century.”

Doctor Lecter's fingers, as he gets back to the desk, lingers briefly on Will's left shoulder, brushing his shirt like the pencil did with the paper – fingers painting clouds on his collar and the violin cries, cries – , and Will flinches away, jolting on the very edge of his chair. If the doctor has noticed, he doesn't pay any heed.

“Tartini is said to have composed this particular tune after he heard the Devil playing it in a dream- from here the name, _Trillo del Diavolo._ ” The psychiatrist pauses, and then lightly adds, “Seems like the Devil can be beautiful, when he decides to, eh?”

The school-bell ring tears the answer that has been forming in Will's chest into shreds, something about beauty and the Devil and the bedroom with the cirrus-ceiling,.

He has to get out of here; his left shoulder feels scorchingly hot. Will rises abruptly and doesn't look back as he opens the door.

“You know where to find me, Will.”

Will shuts the door without hesitations.

In the corridor, the plate – _“Hannibal Lecter”_ – stares at him.

He can still hear the music and the clouds.

 

-

 

Doctor Lecter has finished writing his notes in a heavy notebook.

 _Troubles with eye and physical contact_ ; _Trust issues:_ these aren't uncommon notations by his standards, but there's something in Will Graham he can't quite place.

And that is _good_. Curiosity is a luxury to him, and a challenge a promise of entertainment.

He is going to be patient, though. He is going to built sensorial bridges of trust – of touches, of music; habits to numb Will's wariness – before attempting any risky manipulation.

Will is like a dog, a stray dog with low eyes and bared fangs. To lure a stray, you have to be careful. You have to let it smell your palm, to soothe it with mild words, to feed it; make it trust you. Only then you can be sure it won't run away, that it would follow you into oblivion if you asked it to. Strays are the most faithful of companions once tamed. They always come back.

Hannibal Lecter smugly smiles, as he pours some red wine in a glass. Under the sketch he's been drawing are hidden anatomical studies of muscles and blood vessels, depicting expressionless, flayed faces.

_And he will come back._

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those who don't know, Pavlovian conditioning is about getting a subject to associate events/feelings/states of mind with a certain sensorial stimulus. In Pavlov's case, he rang a bell every time he fed a dog; after some time, the dog started salivating just hearing the sound of the bell.  
> And that's what our HanniBooBoo will try (and succeed) to accomplish in this story.  
> The bedroom sketch is a quiet nod to "Hannibal Rising": the cloud-ceiling room is his mother's.
> 
> (This is the part where I say I'm not a native speaker and blabla. You got it. Feel free to go full grammar-Nazi on me.)


	2. The "looking" equivalence

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Psychiatrists are bad people.

 

Two hours later, Professor Bloom is already there to ask him if that hour with Doctor Lecter has been of any use. A handy lie is all Will's mouth can reach. 

“No,” head-shakes. “Pointless.”

By now, the boy fears he is turning into a pathological liar: lying is how he deals with problems, the easiest and most addictive way of burying sorry truths; under words and fake smiles and glass panels. So, “No”, and a smug grin that should be saying “See, I told you so, like I needed a shrink to be happy” but ends up in an unconvincing grimace.

She doesn't look persuaded: of course, she is no fool, but insisting won't do her any good when Will is involved. Ignoring people is getting worryingly easy to him. One day he will just entrench in his mind fort and never come back, to starve alone among cold stones. 

So the conversation is closed with some trite phrases like “Come to me if you need help, Will”, “Please, tell me should you change your mind” that she means nonetheless, and he should thank her, he should let her come in. Instead, he turns his back to her. 

To care is hard, and to care means to look– faces, eyes, gestures. 

Will wonders whether blindness is a blessing. He can picture a world of pitch blacks under his eyelids, where he could just rest and admire a sable sky, with petroleum clouds sailing in it – _fingers that paints clouds I won't think about it I won't_ – . He needs no help. So he leaves Professor Bloom alone in an empty classroom.

 _This is how it should finish. A psychiatrist, one visit. Period._ _She tried, good for her._

He should be sighing of relief right now, now that he is on the bus that will take him home, his cheap rucksack at his feet, the landscape blurring meaninglessly out of the window. His mind still refuses to refine the latest events, as he won't risk including his time with Doctor Lecter to his long-term memory by revisiting it. _It's particularly upsetting,_ he sullenly thinks, brushing the cold plastic pane with his temple, _the fact that he should get under my skin by doing absolutely nothing, by staying silent. Looks like I'm stupid enough to fall for inverse psychology._ It's not that, though. It's something else, something he can't quite name – his left shoulder tingles – . 

The sun is melting into indigo brushstrokes of dusk, leaking beyond an horizon of inky, leaf-crowned treetops. 

He's spent his afternoon haunting the town streets as usual, like one haggard, too much alive ghost; he has drunk a cup of insipid cocoa in some squalid coffee-shop and stared with blank eyes at the same page of a trashy magazine he found discarded on the seat next to his, reading the same words again and again – “ _Wanna stay hot this winter? Fashion stylist Maggie Trim is here to..._ ” –. 

His father won't be at home, Will knows it: he's fixing motorboats on the nearby coast, or something like that. He will be back when he will be back. It's not as if Will didn't like to be at home- no, far from it. He just likes to be home _late_ , to come back when colours are cooling and noises get muffled by choruses of crickets. So he stops at school until they are about to close the gates, and then wanders, no destination: everyday, just his footsteps etching seasons on the pavement as he avoids crowded boulevards and squares. Time revolves; lights dim and shadows lengthen, and Will's feet follow the familiar path to the bus stop. 

_Today is just another day, that's all,_ he tries to persuade himself, as a shriek of rusty brakes announces the end of his journey. Tomorrow he won't even remember it, memories about the psychiatrist won't last through the night. 

At home, Will feeds Winston – luckily a friend of his father's offered to look after him during the day – and, after a heated-up meal, walks the dog off to the moor nearby. He has left the lights on, even the lantern in the porch, so that the house looks, as he walks far out in dark field-seas, like a distant lighthouse, calling him from cliffs of night; a safe haven always waiting for him to return. He stares at the lights without blinking, until the shining slivers blind him, piercing his gaze through a film of tears, and only then he turns to face the sky. 

It's a clouded night, but Will can see bright blotches of white exploding; phantoms of remembered light carved in his retinae, they spin like newborn galaxies and blossom into constellations, whose linked dots would mirror his house's windows and the lantern in the porch. But it doesn't last. Will outstares his own stars. 

When he blinks they scatter, and gradually, hopelessly, they _fade_. The sky turns black. His eyes are sore. The sky has always been black. 

An epiphany of starless skies hits him and cages a breath in Will's lungs- and then a realization comes, thoughts he has been mulling over for hours finally clacking into a clear route of understanding.

Now Will knows that he doesn't need some silence.

– _he thinks of faceless words and polished plaques, antlers and bronze orbs watching from above, long fingers and baroque violins –_

He needs a world of reassuring unreality.

 

 

–

 

 

Two weeks of repressed intents have slid by when Will finds himself walking toward Doctor Lecter's study. He told Professor Katz he wasn't feeling well, and she naively let him leave the classroom to go and rest for the rest of the hour in the school infirmary.

He's still sure he is not _actually_ going to do anything, just some sort of watch-the-door-and-flee, like a stupid teenage dare, until he hears his own traitorous hand knocking on the door. The plaque glints mockingly at him as the doorknob turns.

“Will, what a surprise,” follows an accented voice that sounds all but surprised, “please, come in.”

He is exactly – still no face, though, no eyes – like Will remembered him, which is not that weird considering only twelve days have passed, but “exactly” in the upsetting way an exquisitely tailored déjà-vu would look always the same. Time has glided on Doctor Lecter and his room and succeeded only in changing his clothes' hue and spinning the clock's hands. Entering the study feels like stepping into an amber bubble of past, inside which hours are a resinous glue and that day – two weeks before, fingers and clouds and violins – isn't over yet.

“Do you have any problems?”

It occurs then to Will that he has absolutely nothing to say.

“No.” 

“Of course you don't,” his voice is mocking, yet still manages to sound polite. “So, Will, do you just need some silence?”

When lies can't help you, monosyllables can.

“No.”

“Therefore I guess I still have only one more spare question: I'm bound to ask, no offense, why are you here?”

 _Because I'm an idiot,_ that's what he would like to say, is going to say, is saying- but words choke him and what he blurts out, a heavy gasp swelling within his throat, is, surprisingly, the truth.

“Air. To– to breathe.”

Really smart of him. Giving disturbing answers to a man that studies the disturbed for a living. As he sits down, Will toys with the idea of hitting an especially sturdy book on the desk with his head to achieve some peaceful state of unconsciousness. He sourly discards it. 

Yet, against every expectation, Doctor Lecter doesn't focus on his bad choice of words. He just chuckles.

“Very well. You can relax then, because I am quite sure there is enough oxygen for the both of us, in this room.”

He paces around the writing-desk and sits in his leather armchair, his movements the exact replica of what Will remembers him doing last time: one hand twisting the jacket-button, one hand caressing his tie. The same paper shuffling, the same clink of pencils.

“Now, if you excuse me, I will go back to my sketch.” 

This time Will knows he's not lying. 

His shoulders drops and his fists open bit by bit .

He watches the psychiatrist's fingers as they smooth the paper-sheet, how they carefully grip a scalpel – it looks almost normal in his hand, not a weapon or a medical tool, but an instrument of sterile precision – and press it against the pencil point until it lifts an helix of wooden skin.

Suddenly, stupidly, Will feels _free_. He can go if he wants, or stay if he wants; or read every title – English and German, French and Italian – on the book-backbones lined on the bookshelves, if he wants. He told Doctor Lecter he has come to breathe, so he might as well do some breathing. He fills his lungs with too much air just to empty them again, until he starts feeling lightheaded, until his mind sinks in the surrealistic mood of the room.

Maybe Will has never left his chair, maybe everything he's seen for the past two weeks has been just some stunted dream stillness brought him.

“Black swans are the challenge of the day. All those hints of light, shadows among feathers, and the sudden, spontaneous burst of crimson on the beak.” 

_'S's, sounds of sibilant 'S's_ ; Will's feet touch are touching the ground. He forgot. It takes some seconds before the words – _hiss, like a serpent, hiss, but no apples, so it's safe_ – recall their own meaning in Will's ears.

_Swans._

Indeed, on the former white page now lives a grey graphite-lake whose surface reflects two pairs of interwoven black wings, and long necks. Over them, ghost-heads stay suspended, waiting to rise from alluded lines.

“Without doubt, _red_ is the enemy.”

Will's eyes fly up. It's as simple as that. For the first time, Will is looking _at_ Doctor Lecter. As shallow as it may sound, the first thing Will thinks it's that the psychiatrist is older than what he would have surmised. The second thing it's that there is something wrong with his face. A thin mouth that ends in a quirked upper lip, unnaturally stretched cheekbones, eye-sockets too deep – but his eyes, he won't look – . Two vertical wrinkles around his mouth, two diagonal wrinkles next to his nose: _not enough_ , comes spontaneous to think, _as if in all his life he has only smiled and watched_. 

Still, it's just a face, like any other face. And he doesn't care, so he will stop looking.

Why has he looked in the first place? Because he could have sworn he has seen _, just seen,_ in that assertion some echo of ghosts of his own. 

“Because,” Doctor Lecter goes on, “how can we colour something red when only grays are available? Yes, one can point to the pencilled monochrome outline of a rose and state it's red, but would that be the truth? Couldn't it be yellow, light pink or blue; or, why not, just a black rose? How can we extrapolate without visual supports a metaphysical red, a redless red, and grasp whatever remains after we subtract colour from a colour?”

 _Yes_. Will thinks he understands. Redless red: it would be so redder than real red. 

Like stargazing starless stars, windowpanes glittering in the night – they were there until they weren't – . There is a grandiosity to unreal skies that makes all the horizons reality could ever offer seem pale, transparent. Maybe Doctor Lecter can see it too. 

“I'm sorry, Will, I must be boring you with all this nonsense. I just find human boundaries quite fascinating. _The paragon of animals._ We still know so little, after all this time. We talk with words too weak to bear their meanings.” 

Then, in the short-lived pause between two heartbeats, something in his tone changes. It feels to Will like he's watching an actor on stage playing one beautiful tragic role, and becoming so engrossed with a certain line he forgets for an instant that he should talk with the character's mouth and not with his own. The accent is the same, deep and strong, but the way he links word to word becomes sharper, almost cruel. 

“What is _red_ when eyes are closed? What is _hunger_ when the feast is over? Solutions dwell beyond our reach, and so we look for a compromise.” 

The actor remembers his anguish is just a prop and slips back in character. 

“And that compromise, we call it 'art'.”

Will stares at the silence. _A compromise._

He wonders how it would be to watch reality in its complexity and _get_ it, whether it would be as calm and clear as an endless lucid dream. 

He'll never know, though. Not when his mind is just a playground for other people's thoughts, not while he remains just an occasional witness within his own brain. He can't even go out of his mind fort if he wants to stay safe, to stay _himself_. Hence he can empathizes with Doctor Lecter and his doubts about reality. “Empathize” in a active, self-controlled way, for once; not as a passive mirror like usual. It is a nice change, to worry because he wants to. 

Ok, so maybe he cares. A little. So maybe he will look at him. A face, still, just a face- but an unthreatening one. 

“Have you found it?”

The psychiatrist has got back to his drawing while he was musing.

“What, Will?”

“A compromise.”

Will sees his smile for the first time. It's a strange thing, of thin lips and sharp canines, that make it look a little wolfish.

“For red? For hunger? Yes. I believe I have.” 

“And it is...?”

Another smile. Different this time, closed lips in a taut curved line. It is kind of phony.

“Oh, it's a secret. And – as one should always reply in these occasions to let clichés live on – I'd love to tell you, but then I would have to kill you,” he grins. “I can give you one clue, though.”

The doctor rises from his armchair, and slips in a corner of the room; clicks and noises of pushed buttons, and– _Violins_ , Will thinks, and the baroque melody starts again. It's Tartini, again, Tartini, the Devil is playing a sonata in an ancient dream. 

“The first step is to stop caring about conventions.” 

Then there is an hand on his shoulder and it _stays_ there. Will's whole body twitch, but quiveringly maintains its ground in the chair. 

The hand hovers away, and a sudden, humorous glee fills Doctor Lecter's voice.

“That is exactly why I am going to use red pencils for my black-and-white sketch.”

And, despite the fingers – _where are the clouds?_ – that have clasped his shoulder, Will can hear himself chuckling. 

 

 

When the school-bell chimes, Doctor Lecter hands him the drawing.

The swans are winged shadows in grey filigree and, within a monochrome world, their beaks blaze with deep-red saturation.

“I'd like you to keep it.”

 _Maybe you will understand,_ it is left unsaid.

There's a “Thank you” in Will's nod, and a “I don't know if I'll come back”.

That night, Will turns off all the lights and, lain on his bed, raises the drawing with both hands.

If he closes his eyes, Will can see the crimson flame of the beaks.

 

 

–

 

 

He does come back. 

Once, twice, and then he wisely decides to stop counting.

Professor Bloom has given him the green light, allowing him to spend the time of one afternoon lesson in Doctor Lecter's office. (She was so happy when Will asked her, almost pathetically so, hadn't she looked so lovely with that broad smile and bright blue eyes)

At first he lets weeks pass, then days, until the gap between visits grows so short that Doctor Lecter starts saying “See you tomorrow, Will” when the bell rings. 

They talk, most of the time, but when silence falls it feels only like another kind of language. They never talk about _him,_ though. Will watches him drawing; every sort of subject, from moon-drenched forests to Florentine vistas. Then Doctor Lecter turns Tartini on, and brushes his shoulder as he sits again. By now Will can hum along for the whole sonata, and has to restrain himself from doing so. Inside the study that never changes, Will can hear his own thoughts and forget about the swarming world seething on the other side of the door. And, as days go by, his visits to Doctor Lecter become familiar daydreams he looks forward to: a daily dose of balance made of surreal conversations and sharp-canines smiles – that he always returns now – . 

Will doesn't know when this weird metamorphosis began, all he knows is that one day he looks at Doctor Lecter's strange structured face and suddenly _needs_ to tell him everything. So strange, to feel secrets push against the rear of his throat, _so many_. Yet, he realizes he lacks the means to free them. There are rusty sentences in the depth of his heart, malformed stories about his life; but ruins are all he can find. To voice what he cannot possibly mention, not if he wants to be deemed sane- there are no words. 

Will is _wordless_. 

He clenches his teeth till his jaw hurts. If only he could focus on that word whirlpool he feels swirling under his tongue, then- He just needs _one_.

“Headaches.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I have _headaches_.”

Doctor Lecter puts the pencil down. Now Will can't go back.

“Are you on any medications?”

“No.”

“Would you tell me about your headaches, Will?”

For a split second, Doctor Lecter sounds and looks like every psychologist Will has ever talked to, hungry and curious. But then he tilts his head and returns to be foreign, odd-looking, well-dressed, – _safe_ – Doctor Lecter. 

So Will opens his mouth and watches the words he has never said flow out like slimy sewage.

“I can't think. It's just this- this- _noise_ , this crackling noise, all the time, this humming static that coats my thoughts, and leaves me suffocating beneath an impermeable veil of dark oil. And under it I sweat, I melt, like too, too much steaming water. 

“Insecurities are typical of your age, Will. In this period of your life you might feel alienated, alone, even though nothing actually-”

“ – no, no; I'm not- I'm not some hormonal teenager, doctor. It's my mind: there something _wrong_ with my mind.”

“Why are you saying that?”

Will can see it, the crossroads. To keep talking means to let Doctor Lecter in his mind. To stop means to be trapped in his mind-fort alone. 

Will looks Doctor Lecter in the eyes. 

Brownish-red, and round. No colour specks, just smooth maroon lakes. Sort of plain. They are staring right back. What surprises Will is that he can see his own face reflected into them, but nothing else. No judgment, no fleeing thoughts. _There is no Doctor Lecter in Doctor Lecter's eyes._

He _is_ looking. Now he has to care.

Will opens the fort gate and, watching himself talking in the psychiatrist's gaze, starts speaking.

“I watch others and, compared to me, they look too material, too real. Their lives are heavy, their shadows solid and their minds bore into me like bullets. They are- _too much_ , I see too much, I loose too much. And they are... that's it. _They_ _are._ Whereas I'm not completely sure I always _am.”_

Will looks so thin and sad, so young inside the doctor's eyes.

“I walk and my steps sound like they do in my dreams.”

His heart throbs like a raw wound, now he can only pray. He feels Damocles' sword grazing his neck.

Deliberately slowly, Doctor Lecter moves his gaze away and smiles.

“As a psychiatrist, the first thing I have learnt is that no mind can be _wrong_. Flawed, yes, but not wrong. Minds are intricate entities, each one sustaining an unparalleled weight, one world-full of peculiar truths. They are our own personal Atlas. They can be alike, or unalike, so there are pitiful minds and exquisite minds and so forth, just as there are different kinds of people. I like to think of minds as houses: there are cabins, and cottages, and country-houses. Some minds are but shacks, stacks of planks and filthy stones.”

He raises from his chair, following their usual unsaid ritual. Violins, Tartini, Devils and trills, they will tell him that it's okay, nothing has changed, nothing can ever change in this room anyway. So Will is expecting an hand on his shoulder. But this time the hands are two and press his shoulders with firm kindness. He has no strength left to struggle away from them. Doctor Lecter's voice comes from behind him and drips like honey on his ear.

“And some minds are _palaces_.”

Abruptly, the bell rings. Will doesn't move. The hands do.

If he closes his eyes, he can see a scarlet stare, glowing as brightly as swans' beaks.

He wonders what the fact his mind is a fort says about him.

“I'll see you tomorrow, Will.”

 

 

–

 

 

Will doesn't show up the following day, or the next one.

As soon as he has got out of the study, it hit him, the enormous stupidity of what he has just done. He had _sworn_ to himself he'd never let his madness be seen.

Fear kept him far from the psychiatrist's door at first, then prudence, because insanity to men such as Doctor Lecter would seem as fascinating as a caged exotic animal; then shame, then another kind of fear, because maybe Doctor Lecter got mad at him after he stopped visiting. He has said “tomorrow”, after all, and Doctor Lecter is a man of politeness and good manners. 

A week later from that day, Will admits his defeat and with his head hanging low knocks at the psychiatrist's door. The plaque glares at him with contempt.

As it opens, Will bursts out, freeing seven days and one morning of compressed worry,

“I'm sorry, doctor. I- Really, I'm sorry, I know I've been so... rude.”

Doctor Lecter stays silent, as if weighing his apology, and then smiles – the curved closed-lips one – .

“No justification necessary. You're not my patient, Will. I draw, you rest, and we have conversations. You are free to come whenever you like.”

Then, resuming their normal routine, he adds, “Please, come in.”

“Today I am working on something quite unusual.”

Will's sigh is so deep that plucks his whole body like a violin string. It's the eighth day since his confession, it's the eighth day and he is back. The doctor is not angry. _Nothing can ever change in this room_ , he remembers, _just Doctor Lecter's suit and the subject he'll give life to on a new paper-sheet._

He sits in his usual chair. Then he notices that indeed Doctor Lecter is not drawing as usual. His fingers are holding a paintbrush, its bristles black-laced with thick paint. On the blank paper, in neat strokes, Will can see a portrait of an oriental woman. Lush inky mouth, raven hair braided in a bun, long lashes. What astonishes Will is that she has no eyes. Just two eyes-shaped dark spaces. Next to her face, an ideogram stands out in all its fluid, painstaking precision.

“Who is she?”

“No one. It's only a Japanese theatre mask. A woman, every woman. And this,” he points to the ideogram with a vague remembering expression, as he hands the painting to Will, “is 'eternity'. _Eternity in eight strokes_. It lacks the last two strokes, though.”

The mask that looks like a woman stares at him. 

_A mask._ All humankind in one face. And no eyes. Everyone could look through it, fill the hollows with their own eyes. Will thinks masks must be afraid of eyes, because the equilibrium of blind holes is a frail one, and it would be so easy for eyes to break it with a single gaze.

Then a question swells in some remote zone of his brain. _Why is Doctor Lecter showing it to him, why why why?_

“I- I am- I-”

“You don't have to say anything, Will, if you don't want to.”

Doctor Lecter sees, he has _understood_. This is his way to let Will know.

Will watches the pitch black depth of the mask's eyes and discovers his whole life and a half-finished eternity.

When he speaks, he does in the calm, blank tones of who is certain of defeat.

“So I am a mask,” a mirthless laugh. “Of course. Faces, faces, faces, I can see with anyone's eyes but which are _mine_ eyes? What if they don't exist, after all? I'm looking for my real face in a sea of other faces, and all the faces fit in the same way. I could be no one at all. And anyone.”

Doctor Lecter lets a drop of ink fall from the brush. The paper swallows it and there it spreads in lines, like a black frayed fire. In the end it looks like a wet spider oozing from her – _its_ – cheek. Then he moves his gaze on Will.

“You could be anyone,” he says in a matter-of-fact tone, as if Will were an obtuse student who has just understood something awfully easy, “and it's the vagueness, all the implied shades of good and evil, that horrify you. Associations rouse your hatred, alternatives appal your sense of shame, but allure you nonetheless. Your imagination can lead you down every conceivable path, from righteousness to corruption, and you can understand both. In your mind, you can feel your limbs shivering with the ecstasy of a monster. That's what you are afraid of.” 

Doctor Lecter adds the last two strokes to 'eternity'.

“Are you a martyr or a murderer, Will?” 

There's something of a challenge in the way he says it, as if he already knew the answer and found it particularly amusing.

But Will doesn't hear the mocking undertones in it, because nausea chokes him and shivers threaten to break his bones at every breath. His sweat is ice, he has bitten his lower lip so hard he now can taste the metallic tang of blood in his mouth. What Doctor Lecter has whispered epitomizes every nightmare he has ever had. And so he responds in the only way he can.

“I don't know.” 

Doctor Lecter leaves his chair and in an instant of clearness Will thinks he is going to turn Tartini on, clinks and buttons pushed, as he always does. Yet, this time, the psychiatrist circles the writing desk and stops in front of Will. 

Doctor Lecter then crouches and lays one hand on the boy's knee. The fingers caress him lightly and Will can't help but move his hand and place it next Doctor Lecter's, not quite touching, but their thumbs almost brush, and it's enough and it's perfect and Will lets all go and _sobs_.

“Oh, Will, Will, don't worry. I will help you find out.”

Will feels tears springing behind his eyes. Doctor Lecter's fingers are painting eternity in eight stokes on his thigh. 

_I'm safe, I'm safe, I'm safe._

An unknown warmness tends to his heart's bruises and leaves him empty and blissful.

Everything will be just fine.

Will looks into Doctor Lecter's empty eyes and he, suddenly, _cares_.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hannibal Rising references: swans, mind palaces, Japanese ladies and eternity in eight strokes. 
> 
> I resisted the temptation to publish this chapter half-finished for days and days: someone give me my medal already. *foaming at the mouth* There will be a gazillion of typos et similia, considering that a) I've no moral strength left to re-read this bitch b) I've no beta reader c) I don't know your bleedin language.  
> [Edit: half an hour late- I found so many errors I kinda feel like throwing up. I wrote "metallic pang of blood", for Christ's sake]
> 
> Last thing, then I'm going to bed yes I am really I am, is: thank you for the super nice feedback for chapter one. I wasn't expecting it, and I honked like a happy seal for hours.


End file.
